Poet – Frederick William Harvey D.C.M.
A poet and a solicitor his poetry became popular during and after the Great War. He was a friend of Ivor Gurney who both attended King’s School in Gloucester, and the composer Herbert Howells. Howells set a number of Harvey’s poems to music.
He joined the 5th Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment as a private on 8 August 1914 and was promoted to Lance Corporal and award a Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) in August 1915. He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant and was taken prisoner in the German front line on 17 August 1916 when on a reconnaissance patrol. Harvey was a veteran of seven camps and the prisoner’s unofficial poet, began one of his famous poems ‘What We Think Of’ with the lines: ‘Walking round our cages like the lions at the Zoo, We see the phantom faces of you, and you, and you…’ Perhaps his most famous poem is ‘Ducks’ written after he had returned from a period of solitary confinement after a failed escape attempt when at Holzminden Camp. He saw that a fellow prisoner had drawn a picture over his bed of ducks in a pool of water. His first volume of poems, A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad, was published in September 1916, shortly after his capture. He began to write more intensively in captivity, and poems were sent back to England for publication: his second collection, Gloucestershire Friends, appeared in 1917. His time in the camps is held to be his most productive period of writing.
He married Anne Kane in 1921 and they had two children. He lived something of a Bohemian lifestyle giving his professional time for free as well as his income. He worked as a defence solicitor and became known as the ‘poor man’s solicitor. In 1920 he published a memoir of his prison-camp experiences, ‘Comrades in Captivity’; and in 1921 ‘Farewell’, an acknowledgement of his intention to remove himself from the literary world. He had a brief creative union with his great friend and collaborator, Ivor Gurney. Gurney had written ‘After-Glow’ and ‘To His Love’ for Harvey, on hearing of his supposed death in 1916; and ‘Ypres-Minsterworth’ as a gesture of solidarity with him in his captivity. Their reunion was cut short by Gurney's mental breakdown in 1922 (1) & (2)
He died in 1957 and was buried at Minsterworth. Harvey was commemorated in 1980 by a slate memorial tablet in the south transept of Gloucester Cathedral. ‘Ducks’, Harvey's best known verse, was voted one of the nation's 100 favourite poems in 1996 in a nationwide poll conducted by the BBC.
Poem – What We Think Of
What We Think Of
Walking round our cages like the lions at the
Zoo,
We think of things that we have done, and things
we mean to do :
Of girls we left behind us, of letters that are due,
Of boating on the river beneath a sky of blue,
Of hills we cUmbed together — not always for the
view.
Walking round our cages Uke the lions at the Zoo,
We see the phantom faces of you, and you, and
you,
Faces of those we loved or loathed — oh everyone
we knew!
And deeds we wrought in carelessness for happiness or rue.
And dreams we broke in folly, and seek to build
anew, —
Walking round our cages like the lions at the Zoo.
Painting – Not a painting but a photograph of a Falkirk District PoW
The Camps
The federal nature of Germany created a decentralised PoW system that had large variations depending on the district in which the camp was located. The country was also organised around twenty-four semi-autonomous military districts each of which was under the command of an Army Corps commander and they in turn appointed a Deputy Commanding General who represented him while he was serving in the field. As well as administering the Army Corps districts these Deputy Commanding Generals were also responsible for the PoW camps within each of their districts with twenty-one camps within twenty-four of the districts. An attempt was made by the Prisoner of War Department of the Prussian Ministry of War to introduce guidelines to standardise PoW policy across all twenty-four districts. However, each of the Army Corps commanding generals reported directly to the Kaiser and they resisted these attempts. They interpreted the regulations as they saw fit and they personally appointed camp commandants who took their lead from their commanders.
There were three categories of camps. Officers were sent to one of seventy-five Offiziersgefangenenlager and they did not have to work. Other Rank (OR) prisoners were sent to one of eighty-nine Kreigsgefangenenlager or, in one of the thousands of work camps across Germany these work camps being attached to the Kreigsgefangenenlager for administrative purposes. These camps were reported by Inspectors to be satisfactory with the exceptions being Gardelegen, Wittenberg and Minden. From 1915 onwards, British OR PoWs were kept in Arbeitslager and Arbeitskommandos with the exact number of these camps unknown. They varied in scale and in scope and contained anything from a single prisoner on a farm to thousands of men working in mines or in factories. The coal and salt mine work details were the most notorious.
Notes
1. Kavanagh, P. J., ed. (1982). Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 35, 41, 229.
2. J. Potter ed., Three Poets of the First World War (Penguin 2011) pp. 9 and 119.
Suggested further reading:
Boden, Anthony; Thornton, R. K. R., eds. (2011). F. W. Harvey: Selected Poems. Coleford: Douglas McLean.
Comments